Plot-based urbanism : towards time-consciousness in place-making

Some of us have recently argued that what we still miss is the serious consideration of the factor of time in urbanism, or, in other words, a deeper "time conscious" approach (Thwaites, Porta, Romice, & Greaves, 2008). Inevitably, that means focusing on change as the essential dynamic of evolution in the built environment, which in turn leads to re-addressing concepts like control, self-organization and community participation. After time and change have been finally firmly placed at the centre stage, the whole discipline of urban planning and design, its conceptual equipment as well as its operational toolbox, reveals its weaknesses under a new light and calls for the construction of a different scenario. This paper poses the problem of this scenario in disciplinary terms, it argues about its premises and outlines its essential features. The scope of this paper is not to deliver a comprehensive model for a new approach to urban planning and design, but to set the right framework and rise the right questions so that we can start thinking of issues such as urban regeneration, informal settlements and massive urbanization, community participation and representation, beauty and humanity in space, in a different way

The psychology of engagement : communities in action

Design has a strong effect on people, hence it ought to be based on a clear understanding of the way in which people engage with the environment around them

Masterplanning for change : lessons and directions

Unprecedented worldwide urbanisation, financial instability, climate change and emerging new lifestyles are challenging the capacity of cities to attract and retain people and activities. Particularly, as many masterplan-driven developments realised from the second half of last Century have been criticised for their inability to cope with changing needs and uncertainty of future outcomes and for their incongruity with native physical, socio-economic and environmental contexts, the need to reform conventional approaches to masterplanning is now pressing. As cities competitiveness and success depends on their capacity to meet these manifold challenges, a new generation of masterplans has emerged over the recent years to respond more clearly to the sustainability agenda. However as we become increasingly aware that cities are inherently unstable and prone to unpredictable change over time, to complement the concern for sustainability, resilience as applied in the field of system-ecology needs now consideration. The paper argues that re-evaluating masterplanning against the theoretical framework of resilience would help defining a reformed approach, referred to as “Masterplan for Change”, more openly aimed at giving strategic direction and spatial quality to places, while accommodating modification over time. However the role of resilience in guiding urban design and masterplanning is still marginal. Hence, the fundamental link between sustainability and resilience is clarified and a preliminary list of guiding principles of “Masterplan for Change”, emerged from combination between urban design sustainability and socio-ecological resilience principles, suggested

Design for change : five proxies for resilience in the urban form

The sheer complexity and unpredictability characterizing cities challenges the adequacy of existing disciplinary knowledge and tools in urban design and highlights the necessity to incorporate explicitly the element of change and the dimension of time in the understanding of, and intervention on, the form of cities. To this regard the concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which to understand and engage with a changing world. However today resilience is addressed by urban designers only superficially, and an explicit effort to relate elements of urban form to resilience principles is still lacking, representing a great limit for urban designers, as form is their elective medium of intervention in the urban system. As first steps to overcome this gap, we explore in this work the combination of established knowledge in urban morphology and urban design, with knowledge developed in resilience theory and we look at the configuration of, and interdependencies between, different urban elements from the perspective of five proxies of urban form resilience, namely diversity, redundancy, modularity, connectivity and efficiency. After defining each proxy in resilience theory and in relation to urban form, we address them at five different scales which are relevant to urban morphology and urban design: plot, street edge, block, street and sanctuary area / district

The Road to Masterplanning for Change and the Design of Resilient Places

Knowing what to design is the foresight that tomorrow’s cities need more than anything. This paper presents the Urban Design Studies Unit of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow’s coordinated approach to research in different areas of urbanism, and how we used such approach in evidence‐based masterplanning. To explain what is unarguably a complex approach to the design of the city, this paper will start with an overview into our group’s point of view on cities, and continue with a short summary of our journey to learn some aspects of how cities are. We will touch upon a few milestones only, but hopefully enough to explain the questions that have led us to what we call ‘Masterplanning for Change’, our normative approach to city design

Measuring urban form : overcoming terminological inconsistencies for a quantitative and comprehensive morphologic analysis of cities

Unprecedented urbanisation processes characterise the Great Acceleration, urging urban researchers to make sense of data analysis in support of evidence-based and large-scale deci- sion-making. Urban morphologists are no exception since the impact of urban form on funda- mental natural and social patterns (equity, prosperity and resource consumption’s efficiency) is now fully acknowledged. However, urban morphology is still far from offering a comprehensive and reliable framework for quantitative analysis. Despite remarkable progress since its emergence in the late 1950s, the discipline still exhibits significant terminological inconsistencies with regards to the definition of the fundamental components of urban form, which prevents the establishment of objective models for measuring it. In this article, we present a study of existing methods for measuring urban form, with a focus on terminological inconsistencies, and propose a systematic and comprehensive framework to classify urban form characters, where ‘urban form character’ stands for a characteristic (or feature) of one kind of urban form that distinguishes it from another kind. In particular, we introduce the Index of Elements that allows for a univocal and non-interpretive description of urban form characters. Based on such Index of Elements, we develop a systematic classification of urban form according to six categories (dimension, shape, spatial distribution, intensity, connectivity and diversity) and three conceptual scales (small, medium, large) based on two definitions of scale (extent and grain). This framework is then applied to identify and organise the urban form characters adopted in available literature to date. The resulting classification of urban form characters reveals clear gaps in existing research, in particular, in relation to the spatial distribution and diversity characters. The proposed framework reduces the current inconsistencies of urban morphology research, paving the way to enhanced methods of urban form systematic and quantitative analysis at a global scale

Sustainable plot-based urban regeneration and traditional masterplanning practice in Glasgow

Conventional approaches to housing development in regeneration areas are failing to provide effective supply on the many derelict and vacant sites currently available in inner city Glasgow, exacerbating the loss of households to the suburbs, and leaving behind abundant developable but vacant land. Plot-based urbanism offers an innovative approach to development, based on the creation and maintenance of a structure made up of fine-grained elements, in the form of plots, capable of incremental development, by a range of agencies. The proposed approach is based on historical and morphological study of changing urban form and control in Glasgow; it suggests that the disaggregated pattern of land subdivision characteristic of the 19th century city remains of great relevance for future development. Initial results of the study suggest that the physical form and organisation of urban land might relate to the degree of self-organisation possible at neighbourhood level. By relating the physical characteristics and patterns of control of individual plots of land to the flow of investment into urban development, this study assists future master planning and investment in regeneration of city neighbourhoods, by suggesting ways of making investment more informed, and the development process more responsive, to the changing priorities which are an integral aspect of urban change. We argue that the publicly-funded sector could adopt the role of provider of opportunity for housing by others, capable of taking on the task of small-scale house building, within a strategically-sound framework established and guided by the publicly-funded sector itself, bringing increased control over the housing process to those participating in it

Plot-based urbanism and urban morphometrics : measuring the evolution of blocks, street fronts and plots in cities

Generative urban design has been always conceived as a creation-centered process, i.e. a process mainly concerned with the creation phase of a spatial transformation. We argue that, though the way we create a space is important, how that space evolves in time is ways more important when it comes to providing livable places gifted by identity and sense of attachment. We are presenting in this paper this idea and its major consequences for urban design under the title of “Plot-Based Urbanism”. We will argue that however, in order for a place to be adaptable in time, the right structure must be provided “by design” from the outset. We conceive urban design as the activity aimed at designing that structure. The force that shapes (has always shaped) the adaptability in time of livable urban places is the restless activity of ordinary people doing their own ordinary business, a kind of participation to the common good, which has hardly been acknowledged as such, that we term “informal participation”. Investigating what spatial components belong to the spatial structure and how they relate to each other is of crucial importance for urban design and that is the scope of our research. In this paper a methodology to represent and measure form-related properties of streets, blocks, plots and buildings in cities is presented. Several dozens of urban blocks of different historic formation in Milan (IT) and Glasgow (UK) are surveyed and analyzed. Effort is posed to identify those spatial properties that are shared by clusters of cases in history and therefore constitute the set of spatial relationships that determine the morphological identity of places. To do so, we investigate the analogy that links the evolution of urban form as a cultural construct to that of living organisms, outlining a conceptual framework of reference for the further investigation of “the DNA of places”. In this sense, we identify in the year 1950 the nominal watershed that marks the first “speciation” in urban history and we find that factors of location/centrality, scale and street permeability are the main drivers of that transition towards the entirely new urban forms of contemporary cities